Arthur C Clarke, the pioneering science fiction author and technological visionary best known for the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died at his home in Sri Lanka, aged 90.

Clarke, who wrote more than 100 books in a career spanning seven decades, died of heart failure linked to the post-polio syndrome that had kept him wheelchair-bound for years.

His forecasts often earned him derision from peers and social commentators.

But although his dreams of intergalactic space travel and colonisation of nearby planets were never realised in his lifetime, Clarke's predictions of a host of technological breakthroughs were uncannily accurate.

He was one of the first people to suggest the use of satellites for communications, and in the 1940s forecast that man would reach the moon by the year 2000 - an idea that experts at first dismissed as nonsense.

The astronomer Patrick Moore, a friend of Clarke's since the 1930s, said: "He was a great visionary, a brilliant science fiction writer and a great forecaster. He foresaw communications satellites, a nationwide network of computers, interplanetary travel; he said there would be a man on the moon by 1970, while I said 1980 - and he was right."

In 1983, Clarke wrote: "At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years,"

On his 90th birthday last December Clarke recorded a farewell message to his friends, saying he would have liked to have seen evidence of extraterrestrial life during his lifetime.

His secretary, Rohad de Silva, last night confirmed that Clarke had died from a cardio-respiratory attack.

Clarke was born in Minehead, Somerset, in December 1917 and served as a radar specialist in the Royal Air Force during the second world war.

He became involved in the British Interplanetary Society after the war, where he proposed the idea for satellites as telecommunications relays.

He sold his first story, The Rescue Party, in May 1946. In 1952 his non-fiction book The Exploration of Space became a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic.

A keen diver, he moved to Sri Lanka in 1956 where he wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey; in 1968 he shared an Oscar nomination for the film with director Stanley Kubrick with whom he wrote the screenplay.

Clarke was knighted in 2000 in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo - more than two years after the honour was conferred on him. He had been confined to a wheelchair since 1995, a victim of post-polio syndrome.